| Summary/Abstract |
In an era marked by the twin rise of populist and pandemic politics, the world has witnessed a dizzying array of policy initiatives aiming at ensuring the quick return of refugees, rejected asylum seekers and irregular migrants.Footnote1 This Special Issue was conceptualised at a time when countries such as the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US) and Denmark, previously portrayed as traditional countries of resettlement, have placed the returns (expels or deportation) of asylum seekers at the forefront of their politics of migration. Key regional migrant-receiving and refugee-hosting countries from Colombia, Kenya, Malaysia to Pakistan have lobbied for accelerated returns and deportations, decrying the strains that refugees and migrants pose on their infrastructures. In situations of protracted displacement, despite the United Nations Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) warning against perilous returns, first-host states, including Lebanon, Turkey and Bangladesh, have implemented rash return initiatives, aligning their politics of return with their geostrategic interests in regional conflicts on the one hand, and decrying insufficient global solidarity on the other (Fakhoury and Stel Citation2022; Mencütek Citation2022).
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